It is the custom to send a woman to interview Omar Sharif. His reputation as a charming, debonair, black-eyed, hand-kissing international man of mystery still clings to him at the age of 72, although more recent reports have spoken of a bad-tempered and melancholic old man who lives alone in a hotel, having gambled all his money away. Sitting in a suite at the George V hotel in Paris, however, lean and elegantly dressed in black, he appears to be in a very good mood. His famous gap-toothed smile radiates an infectious mischief.

"I've never been unhappy in my life," he says. "I know which [articles] you're talking about. They made me sound unhappy. I'm not unhappy at all." And it's not true either that he is a compulsive gambler. "I was never a gambler in the sense of the term; I only gambled when I was alone, I had no friends, no one to eat with," he says. "I would never think of going to a casino, to a gambling club, if I had someone to dine with."

He was, unfortunately, alone rather more often than not. As recently as last July he was arrested for head-butting a policeman at a casino, after losing, he reckoned, about £200,000. "I gambled, yes," he says now. "I lost quite a bit of money, but I wasn't doing it because I had a passion for it. I had a passion for bridge, and now I've quit even that. Because I don't want to be a slave to any passion any more." Not even, he says, in the case of women. "No. Because it's very bad to underperform, as it were, like in bridge. The reason I quit is because I wasn't as good as I used to be. And now it's the same thing with girls, so why the aggravation?"

It is true that he lives in a hotel, just around the corner from the George V. "I'm all by myself. I thought, it's better to live in a hotel. First of all, they do everything for you. And if you get bored you can go down to the bar. I have my stool in the bar that no one can sit on."

Living alone has allowed him to cultivate his eccentric personal habits. "When I'm not filming I go to sleep at five in the morning and wake up at midday. I eat only in the evening. I can't eat if I don't have wine and I can't have wine during the daytime." It doesn't sound like the lifestyle of a chronically happy man, but Sharif's good mood may, perhaps, be attributed to the fact that things are looking up at work. He has always been frank about the number of terrible films he's made over the years. "Only bad films," he says, "since 1972, 3. I'm thinking of really bad." The star of Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago was also the star of Oh Heavenly Dog! and Beyond Justice, and it clearly bothered him more than he let on: "To learn bad dialogue is so difficult and so boring, and to work with a stupid director who tells you to do the wrong thing, etcetera, it's just unbearable." He threw himself into bridge, became a world-class player and a slave to his passion. "I refused in my life many films because they happened at the same time as an important tournament. That was stupid."

It was not until the mid-90s, however, that he finally got sick of making bad films. His grandchildren (he has two, one aged 20 and the other four) were making fun of him. "And so I decided to stop. I'd stop unless something good came. I didn't mean to retire totally, but I would have retired totally if nothing good had come."

He finally came out of exile last year to make Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Coran, a French art house movie about a Muslim shopkeeper who befriends a Jewish boy. "I thought it was the right moment to make it," he says, "to make a little statement about loving each other and being able to live with each other."

Born Michel Shahoub in Alexandria in 1932, Sharif was educated at a British-style public school and fulfilled his ambition to be an actor after a brief stint working in his father's timber business. He became a household name in Egypt when he married the well-known actress Faten Hamama, appeared in more than a dozen Egyptian films and became, in that comparatively small pond, quite a big fish.

Then, in 1960, he came to the attention of the director David Lean. "I'll never know what my life would have been like if they hadn't made Lawrence of Arabia," he says. "What would I be? I would maybe have 10 children, a very fat wife. I would be very fat myself. I don't know."

What actually happened was that he and Hamama eventually divorced. "I never fell in love again. I never married, I never lived with a girl. I had a very few brief adventures, but not so many, much less than what is attributed to me." But he has made it sound in the past as if he ended his marriage deliberately, almost as a precaution.

"I did, yes, I did. I ended my marriage because, look: first of all my wife was, she had a child before me, from another marriage, she had a child from me. I loved her. I'd lived with her and I loved her. But when I went around in Hollywood from Cairo, it was the year of the women's liberation and the discotheques and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all that. It was Sodom and Gomorrah. I was terrified that some stupid starlet with big tits was going to get me; I would fall in love with her. I had never seen women except covered to here."

He holds his hand at his wrists. "And my wife was getting on in years, and I was afraid to leave her later, when she would have no chance to have another life. So, in fact, I told her that. And it was successful because she then met a man, and she married. She's very happily married until now. So it wasn't such a wrong calculation, but for me, it just didn't work."

For his work in Lawrence of Arabia (it was a two-year shoot) Sharif was paid £8,000 and tied to a contract to make seven films for the same fee, up to and including Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand in 1968. Despite, or perhaps because of, his popularity, he was increasingly cast as a generic foreigner. In his time he has played Mexicans, Nazis, Italians, Genghis Khan, Czar Nicholas II, Che Guevara and Captain Nemo. He also developed a reputation as a playboy, as a ruthless seducer - a fiction, he says, which persisted "because I never bothered to deny it". But he also lies in interviews sometimes, or is at least recklessly facetious. "You've said it all. 'What do you like?' 'I like to read books and ride horses.' How deathly boring. So sometimes you say, 'I hate fresh air! I hate oxygen! I love smoky pubs and air-conditioning knobs.'"

Sharif remains very close to his son Tarek, now 47, and living in Egypt. "My only son? I love my son. He's perfect," he says. Perfect he may be, but he's not Sharif's only son. He has long acknowledged another child, who is now 34. "I have an illegitimate son, I suppose," he says. "I have never checked. I've never denied it. The thing is, I acknowledged that I had a very, very brief affair - I'm speaking of minutes - with some girl, and this woman, she was a newspaperwoman, she was interviewing me, and we just happened to ..." The custom of sending a woman to interview Omar Sharif had, in this case, unforeseen consequences. "And then two years later she sent me photographs of a child who looked exactly like me except for the moustache, and she said this is your son, and I said OK, but I cannot be his father because I don't love his mother."

He has stuck to this harsh line in several interviews, but I suspect this unfeeling intransigence may be bit of a pose, a way of reminding everyone that he doesn't care what they think about him. When I suggest that today he might be compelled to accept financial responsibility, he says: "I don't mind. This child, I used to see him. I've met him and told him, 'If you have any problems write to me. If you need anything I'll give it to you, but I just cannot be your father."

Sharif's latest film is Hidalgo, a big-budget adventure set in 1890, based on the life and horse of cowboy Frank T Hopkins, and centred on a 3,000-mile trans-Arabian horse race. Sharif plays Sheikh Riyadh, breeder of the world's finest stallions. No prizes for guessing who wins. Hidalgo has already been criticised as a jingoistic allegory - Disney-made, no less - but, according to Sharif, it could have been worse.

"When they first sent me the script, there were some things I objected to. I said, 'There are certain sentences which might offend Muslims.'" They were duly changed. "Then I said, 'What I'm afraid of, I don't want at any moment that you get the feeling that it's George W Bush, the cowboy, coming on his horse and beating the Arabs, and waving an American flag [in the race].'" In the end, a flag with some sort of Sioux symbol on it was used, but it's still very much the cowboy against the Arabs; the Arabs cheat, the cowboy wins anyway.

As for America's actual Middle East policy, Sharif is as scathing as he is outspoken: "This whole business of wanting to put democracy in the Middle East is total rubbish. It will never happen." He believes Arabs are too poor and too tribal. "There is no such thing as democracy for a tribal people," he says. "The moment they turn their backs and leave Iraq there will be the most bloody civil war in the history of the world. They will kill each other, the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shia. They will kill each other completely; they will eliminate each other."

For his part Sharif is keen to teach his grandchildren, as he taught his son, that there is no difference between people. He is as much a European as he is an Arab, as he is anything. "The international wog, I am," he says, laughing throatily. "I speak five languages, but I don't have a mother tongue. I don't speak one language perfectly, or without an accent at any rate." He dreams, he says, in the language of whatever country he's in. He has to go. There are several more interviews to do before the sun goes down and he eats his first meal of the day. "Do misquote me if you wish," he says graciously. "Feel absolutely free."

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.